IT was about 11 a.m. when the simple world of 10-year-old Sylvia Camaj got “dark.”

Sylvia, a fourth-grader at Our Lady of Peace School didn’t hear the gunshots, but she knew something was wrong.

Teachers were robotic. Instead of a dreaded math quiz, there was the principal standing in front of her class.

“She told us ‘two people were shot today at Mass and one of them was Father Larry [Penzes],'” the articulate girl said as she clutched her red composition book close to her chest.

The other was a 72-year-old parishioner, Eileen Tosner.

“A lot of us started crying, and I hugged my friend Patricia and cried with her,” she said.

The kids were told to start making cards for Father Larry because school officials decided, smartly, to keep the 400 elementary school students in a protective lockdown.

A gunman was still on the loose.

“When we asked where the guy was, the teacher told us he was in a house and that police were trying to get him,” Sylvia said.

The kids prayed and the teacher gave Sylvia’s class a sheet of paper, telling the distraught students: “It helps if you write down your feelings.”

“Sad. Mad. Afraid. Hurt. Confused.” Those are the words Sylvia calmly said she wrote.

Outside, distraught parents, a few personally affected by 9/11, cried, paced and chain-smoked.

“My mind was stuck on my kids and I blocked everything out. I couldn’t even see the people in front of me,” said Sylvia’s mother, Sonya, who has two other children enrolled in the school. “I just wanted to get my kids out and take them home.”

As the parents waited, they saw a visibly shaken Gaetana Tierney, a parishioner who witnessed the shooting and remained in the school, being escorted down the school steps.

“It was horrible,” Tierney said as she fell into the arms of relatives who were waiting for her.

“The bullet went in through the back of her head and came out of her eye,” she told a parishioner, describing Tosner’s death, as she laid her head against the top of a parked car.

At 2:45 p.m., the parents greeted their kids like war heroes on the tarmac of an airport.

Sylvia wasn’t given any homework yesterday because the teacher told the kids to go home and “pray, pray real hard tonight.”